Photoshop Actions and Presets for Photographers: The Complete Guide to Creating, Installing, Customising, and Using Actions and Presets to Speed Up Your Editing Workflow

Photoshop Actions and Lightroom Presets are automation tools that save photographers enormous amounts of time by recording a sequence of editing steps and replaying them with a single click. An Action in Photoshop records every menu command, tool adjustment, and setting change you make, then replays the entire sequence on any image — turning a 15-minute retouching routine into a one-click operation. A Preset in Lightroom or Camera Raw saves a specific combination of slider values that can be applied instantly to any image, providing consistent colour grading, exposure correction, and tonal adjustments across an entire gallery. Together, these tools transform the editing process from a painstaking image-by-image ordeal into an efficient, consistent, and creatively satisfying workflow.

The distinction between Actions and Presets is important: Actions are procedural — they replay a sequence of steps in order, and the result depends on the starting state of the image. Presets are declarative — they set specific parameter values, regardless of the image's starting state. Actions are more powerful (they can create layers, apply masks, use blend modes, run filters), while Presets are more predictable (the same slider values always produce the same result from the same starting image). Professional photographers use both: Presets for the initial colour grading and tonal treatment in Lightroom, and Actions for the finishing-touch retouching in Photoshop. This guide covers creating, customising, installing, and effectively using both tools.

Creating Photoshop Actions: Recording Your Workflow

To create an Action, open the Actions panel (Window → Actions), click the New Action button, name it descriptively (e.g., "Portrait Finish — D&B + Glow + Sharpen"), assign it to a set and optionally a keyboard shortcut, and click Record. Every operation you perform from this point is recorded — creating layers, applying adjustments, changing blend modes, running filters, resizing, sharpening, everything. When you have completed the workflow, click the Stop button. The Action is now saved and can be replayed on any image by selecting the Action and clicking the Play button.

The key to creating useful Actions is building them with flexibility in mind. Instead of recording a Curves adjustment with specific values (which might be wrong for a differently exposed image), record the creation of a Curves adjustment layer and then insert a Stop with a message ("Adjust the Curves to taste for this image"). The Action pauses at the Stop, lets you make a manual adjustment, and then continues with the remaining automated steps when you click Play again. This hybrid approach — automating the repetitive structural steps (creating layers, setting blend modes, applying masks) while pausing for the creative decisions (how much to brighten, how strong to make the colour grade) — produces Actions that are both fast and flexible.

Creating Lightroom Presets: Saving Your Look

To create a Lightroom Preset, edit an image to achieve the desired look — adjust white balance, tone curve, HSL, colour grading, calibration, effects, and sharpening — then click the + button in the Presets panel and select Create Preset. In the dialog, choose which settings to include in the preset. This is crucial: include only the settings that define your look, not the settings that are image-specific. Typically, you would include Tone Curve, HSL, Colour Grading, Calibration, and Effects, but exclude Exposure, White Balance, and Lens Corrections (which need to be set individually for each image based on its specific conditions).

Organisation is essential when building a preset library. Create preset groups for different purposes: "Wedding — Warm Film", "Wedding — Clean Classic", "Portrait — Soft Glow", "Portrait — Bold Contrast", and within each group, create variations for different conditions (indoor, outdoor, golden hour, open shade). Name presets descriptively so you can identify them in the preset browser without having to preview each one. A well-organised preset library with 10–15 go-to presets covers nearly every shooting scenario and allows you to edit a 500-image wedding gallery in a fraction of the time it would take to manually grade each image.

Customising and Adapting Third-Party Presets and Actions

The market for third-party presets and actions is enormous — thousands of products from established editing companies and individual photographers. While some are excellent, no third-party preset or action will be perfect for your images out of the box, because it was created on different images, with different camera systems, in different lighting. The professional approach is to use third-party presets as starting points — apply the preset, then adjust the settings to suit the specific image. In Lightroom, this means applying the preset and then manually adjusting Exposure, White Balance, and HSL to fine-tune the look. In Photoshop, this means running the Action and then going through each layer, adjusting opacity, refining masks, and modifying the specific adjustment values for each image.

When evaluating third-party presets, test them on a range of your own images — different lighting conditions, different skin tones, different scenes — before committing to using them for client work. A preset that looks beautiful on the creator's sun-drenched beach portrait may look terrible on your cloudy English garden wedding. Check skin tones carefully (many popular presets introduce unflattering yellow-green skin shifts), verify that shadow detail is preserved (heavy fade effects can crush important shadow information), and ensure that the preset works across your typical range of exposures (some presets only look good on perfectly exposed images and fall apart when applied to slightly under or overexposed shots).

Batch Processing: Applying Actions and Presets to Full Galleries

The real efficiency gains from Actions and Presets come from batch processing — applying them to many images simultaneously. In Lightroom, select all the images in a shoot, click the desired preset, and the entire gallery is graded in seconds. For more control, edit one representative image from each lighting setup, then use "Paste Settings" to apply those specific settings to all the similar images from that setup. In Photoshop, use File → Automate → Batch to run an Action on an entire folder of images, processing each one automatically. For web-export sharpening, watermarking, and resizing, batch Actions can process hundreds of images while you do something else entirely.

The most efficient wedding editing workflow combines both: apply a Lightroom preset to the entire gallery for base colour grading and tonal treatment, make individual adjustments to each image for exposure and white balance, export the images that need retouching to Photoshop, run a retouching Action to set up the layer structure, make the manual retouching decisions, and save back. This hybrid approach — automated base treatment plus manual refinement where needed — allows a professional wedding photographer to deliver a consistent, polished 500-image gallery in a fraction of the time a purely manual workflow would require.